Former state Rep. Doug Wardlow looked to be a shoo-in for the Republican nomination for attorney general until moments before the filing period for the office closed on June 5. That’s when Bob Lessard, an 87-year-old former DFL state senator nicknamed “The Ol’ Trapper,” switched parties and jumped into the race.

At first glance, Lessard might not appear to be a serious challenger. He isn’t an attorney, he hasn’t raised much campaign money and his loyalty to the GOP is questionable.

But the lifelong hunting and fishing guide from International Falls is dead serious about running. “This is to me, in my entire political career, the most important thing I’ve ever done,” Lessard said last week.

Why? Because, he said, the Republican Party and other forces are out to repeal the state’s Clean Water, Land and Legacy Amendment, the constitutional provision that he championed and voters approved in 2008 to increase sales taxes to fund programs for clean water, protecting the outdoors, parks and trails and arts and cultural projects.

The amendment has generated more than $2 billion for those purposes. As attorney general, Lessard said, his top priority would be defending that law.

“We simply cannot let that (repeal) happen,” Lessard said. “That’s why it’s so important that every hunter and every angler gets out and votes in the Republican primary.”

But Wardlow thinks his opponent is waving a red herring. “The Legacy Amendment is not in jeopardy,” he said.

Even though the GOP platform calls for its repeal, he said, no one is seriously pushing to cancel the amendment.

As attorney general, Wardlow said, his job would be to enforce the law, not make policy. “I would defend the Legacy Amendment because it’s in the constitution, the highest law of the state.”

The attorney general’s race is wide open this year after the current AG, DFLer Lori Swanson, announced in June that she would run for governor instead of seeking a fourth term as the state’s top lawyer. Five DFLers, most with long political and legal résumés, jumped in to succeed Swanson in a hotly contested primary race.

Wardlow, by contrast, was unop- posed for the Republican endorsement and is regarded as the favorite to win Tuesday’s GOP primary against Lessard and perennial candidate Sharon Anderson. At age 40, he touts a wide range of legal experience that qualifies him to be the state’s chief law enforcement officer. He was born and raised in Eagan and earned bachelor’s and law degrees at Georgetown University. After serving as a law clerk for Minnesota Supreme Court Justice G. Barry Anderson, he practiced civil law in the Twin Cities for several years.

In 2010, he was elected to a seat in the Minnesota House of Representatives that was once held by his father, Lynn Wardlow. After losing that office after one term, he moved to Washington, D.C., to represent U.S. steel producers in international trade litigation, primarily involving imports from China.

About five years ago, he went to work for the Arizona-based Alliance Defending Freedom, a conservative Christian legal-advocacy group that the left-leaning Southern Poverty Law Center describes as “anti-LGBT.” Wardlow said he defended clients’ “rights of free speech and conscience … to lead their lives according to their sincerely held beliefs.”

In 2016, he and his family moved to Prior Lake, where he started a solo law practice that handles “pretty much every kind of civil litigation there is.”

He’s running for attorney general, he said, because “I want to take the politics out of the office and focus on enforcing the law and keeping our communities safe.”

He accused Swanson of filing highprofile lawsuits “to get headlines” and “wasting taxpayer resources” on claims against President Donald Trump’s policies. He said he would focus instead on bolstering the office’s criminal law division to give county attorneys the “backup they need to put criminals behind bars” and on combating human trafficking and the opioid epidemic.

He also would work to rein in “out-of-control rules and regulations” by state agencies.

Lessard, by contrast, was the only professional hunting and fishing guide in the Minnesota Legislature from 1977 through 2002. A member of the Minnesota Fishing Hall of Fame, he was the longest-serving chairman of the Senate Environment and Natural Resources Committee.

The Lessard-Sams Outdoor Heritage Council, which makes natural resources funding recommendations to the Legislature, is named in part for him. He recently took a leave from his state job as special assistant to the commissioner of natural resources.

Needless to say, he is well known by Minnesota sportsmen and women — and passionately outspoken about defending Legacy funding, which lawmakers in both parties have been trying to divert to their pet projects for years.

Lessard isn’t a lawyer, which isn’t a requirement for the attorney general’s job. But he insists he knows plenty about the law and how to hire top-notch legal talent. “When I chaired a committee for 22 or 23 years, I had one lawyer on one side of me and another one on the other side, and we made the laws,” he said.

“And every time I tried to pass or kill a bill on the Senate floor, I had to convince that jury.”

His proudest legislative accomplishments include passage of a bill that created the state lottery; a constitutional amendment that dedicated some lottery proceeds to an environmental trust fund; another constitutional amendment that guaranteed Minnesotans the right to hunt and fish; and a law granting counties, instead of the federal government, the power to manage the Mississippi River headwaters.

Topping them all, he said, was passage of the Legacy Amendment. That occurred six years after he left the Legislature, but he was a leader in the campaign for voters’ approval.

A conservative Democrat during most of his Senate tenure, Lessard left his party and ran — and won — as an independent in his final term. He said he would have run for attorney general as an independent, but when he made his last-minute decision to jump into the race, he didn’t have time to get the required 2,000 voter signatures on a petition, so he picked the Republican column.

Wardlow had raised $118,189 for his campaign by late July, compared with Lessard’s $1,350.

Here are the Republican candidates seeking to become Minnesota attorney general.

Bill Salisbury has been a newspaper reporter since 1971. He started covering the Minnesota Capitol for the Rochester Post-Bulletin in 1975, joined the Pioneer Press as a general assignment reporter in 1977 and was assigned to the Capitol bureau in 1978. He was the paper's Washington correspondent from 1994 through 1999, when he returned to the Capitol bureau. Although he retired in January 2015, he continues to work at the Capitol part time.

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